Warhammer: Vermintide 2’s first major expansion, Winds of Magic, launched last week, and while players will be busy getting stuck into its new challenges, progression system, and fighting the dreaded Beastmen, some might also be wondering what’s next for the game. We spoke to Martin Wahlund, CEO and co-founder of the game’s studio Fatshark, at Gamescom to find out what’s in store for Vermintide 2 in the future.
In the interview, Wahlund told us that “right now we’re looking at the current state of the game. We’re doing a lot of health checks.” He said that the studio has “a lot of metrics, so we can see what people like to play, what they don’t like, under-used careers, under-used weapons, trying to balance a bit – I think that will be the upcoming months.” He added that it will be “looking at feedback from players and seeing what we should change to make the game better.”
He also spoke about things the studio wants to do in the future, such as new adventure levels, as he claimed that “people want that,” plus cosmetics “as something we didn’t have for Winds of Magic that much.” He said “people have been crying out for more cosmetics, so we’ll probably have a look into that. There are all of those kinds of things that we want to do.” It also sounds like some of this is already in the works: “we’ve started a lot of features in the office that haven’t got out yet.”
On how content will work season-to-season, according to Wahlund the studio’s “probably going to keep a lot of the content between seasons. I think each season will have a theme in the lore. The content that will disappear between might be the rewards, the border frames, some cosmetics, and that kind of stuff that will be tied to the season.” However, he clarifies that “the gameplay will probably stay, as long as people like it.”
Wahlund reflected on Grinding Gears’ action-RPG Path of Exile and Blizzard’s dungeon crawler Diablo 3, which both have their own form of seasons, for comparison to Vermintide’s structure. He said “I play a lot of Path of Exile, for example, and they remove gameplay, while Diablo 3, they just tweak game mechanics and stuff like that.” He added, “we get some inspiration from [Path of Exile], but it’s a different game. We need to make it fit [with Vermintide]. Right now we’re looking at all good influences and thinking ‘where should we take it?’”